Green Fire/Bhowani Junction (Limited Edition CD Soundtrack)
Sound:
B Music: B-
Having
looked at Miklos Rozsa’s score for John Wayne’s The Green Berets on the site, one issue considered is how an ace
composer deals with the idea of exotic music and where in Classical Hollywood
product it would runs into limits and stereotypes of the outside world. Two earlier examples of such music scoring
for the composer have been brought together on a single CD, both debuting for
the first time ever as music-only programs.
Green Fire (1954) is a CinemaScope Melodrama
set in Columbia, South America of all places, with Grace Kelly owning her own
coffee “Tara” and getting involved with
fortune hunter Stuart Granger, with the usual complications of villains and the
locals. Skipping the film itself until
it comes out on DVD, Rozsa’s score tries to offer Latin music elements, but
they seem especially now more distant due to the success of recent hit music
from that genre. That includes the
endlessly watered-down versions. At
least Rozsa works the elements in smoothly.
Bhowani Junction (1956) offers Granger with George
Cukor directing. Cukor was coming off of
the amazing Judy Garland A Star Is Born
two years earlier and Rozsa’s music is more limited here, though it was a
CinemaScope production as well (shot by no less than Freddie Young). Ava Gardner was the female lead and the
setting was India, though the music does not go
quite as far to deal with that, and being a more limited score helps. Maybe having Britain pulling out of India is a reason for the less-exotic
music emphasis. We will wait on the DVD
of this too before making further comment, especially as to whether Cukor‘s
vision came through on the film.
The PCM
2.0 sound is stereo in both cases from original master materials, which have
their moments of distortion here and there, but is not bad and both mark cases
where the stereo master were NOT replaced by inferior mono backups like M-G-M
did for a dark period. Some tracks that
were strictly mono recordings from Green
Fire were so bad, that they could not even be included, and extra Bhowani Junction tracks in a “suite”
are mono as they originally were.
Both have
their shares of exotic repetition to create the world they try to represent and
sometimes, a little goes a long way, but it is fair to say that Bhowani Junction is still on the weak
side despite not being as aggressive about musical placement. Rozsa did his best in enhance the Hollywood product he was given and made it
that much better in both cases. You can
judge for yourself by getting one of the only 3,000 copies pressed of this CD
at www.filmscoremonthly.com
where you can also get more information about this and other great FSM label
soundtrack titles.
- Nicholas Sheffo
